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170 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
Olinca Marino, on behalf of various Latin American-based civil
society organizations. Statement Submitted to the Regional Preparatory
Ministerial Conference of Latin America and the Caribbean for the second
phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (10 June 2005)
http://wsispapers.choike.org/cs intervention 10 06.pdf
This statement captures the nexus between redistributive and
recognition-based claims made in the context of the WSIS as articulated
by a significant section of civil-society delegates from Africa, Asia and
Latin America. The emphasis here is not on the negative freedoms associated
with individual liberty, but rather the positive freedoms ensuring
relevance and access of ICTs and the need for meaningful participation
to rectify the structural inequities of policy design and outcome. As we
discussed in the previous chapter, NGOs have played a prominent role in
the process of socioeconomic development in the post-Fordist era. These
largely bureaucratized, development-based organizations have a separate
trajectory from grassroots social movements with a history of involvement
in civil and community rights, movements representing the landless
and small farmers, movements that have mobilized marginalized ethnic,
religious, caste-based or racial minorities, and a variety of other oppositional
movements. Although there are overlaps between developmentbased
NGOs and oppositional social movements, it is usually the latter
that in the context of the South have reinforced the notion that civil society
is a ‘political actor’ that ‘strengthens democracy and citizenship’, the
point being that, in practice, the universality and normative function of
‘civil society’ as the institutional body accountable to public interest in
the field of global communication policy must be re-examined.
We began this book with our premise that the changing role of the
state in the global field of communications and media policy has to be
assessed against a longer history of the modern nation-state and the shifting
modes of accumulation and regulation/regularization. In subsequent
chapters, we have traced the legitimacy of the policy-making process and
its outcomes both within the institutional framework and in terms of how
it is negotiated within given political cultural contexts. We have aimed
to provide a comprehensive account of issues that are central within this
field, but we deliberately focused our attentions beyond the ‘specifics’ of
regulation, by examining policy areas that have proved to be of common
concern for societies across different socioeconomic realities situated in
the uneven neoliberal economic order. The logic behind the organization
of the book and the choice of empirical examples reflects our unorthodox
approach to the study of communication policy. Throughout, we
have argued that there is a need to consider the symbolic politics as well